"By working with Avnet and Xilinx to build an attractive, low-cost, easy-to-use system, Spansion is enabling designers and OEMs to innovate and quickly bring their products to market," said Stephen Lapinski, corporate vice president of marketing for Spansion's Consumer, Set-top Box and Industrial Division (CSID). "We expect this new FPGA board to help drive design activity for a variety of applications and allow highly customized solutions for the Spartan-3A family."

Flash memory is an integral part of the FPGA system solution, providing configuration storage as well as code and data storage. Spansion's MirrorBit NOR technology's high reliability helps ensure the successful configuration of the Spartan-3A FPGA over a long product lifetime, while Spansion's universal footprint -- packaging with consistent pinouts -- allows customers to migrate among densities without altering board layouts.

The Spartan-3A Reference Board can be used for general FPGA prototyping, exploring the Xilinx MicroBlaze soft processor core optimized for use in Xilinx FPGAs and experimenting with multiple FPGA configuration techniques in a multi-boot environment.

"Spansion Flash memory brings an easy way to demonstrate standard FPGA design flows and simplify MicroBlaze application development," said Jim Beneke, vice president of global technical marketing for Avnet Electronics Marketing. "The exceptional capabilities of Spansion's MirrorBit NOR solutions for both parallel and serial Flash, such as a universal footprint and software compatibility, give the customer added flexibility and choice that is crucial to quick and painless development."

An Avnet-developed Windows-based programming application helps the customer to configure the FPGA and program either of the configuration Flash memories included on the board through the supplied USB cable. Avnet is currently taking orders for the board.

About Spansion

Spansion (NASDAQ:
SPSN) is a leading Flash memory solutions provider, dedicated to enabling, storing and protecting digital content in wireless, automotive, networking and consumer electronics applications. Spansion, previously a joint venture of AMD and Fujitsu, is the largest company in the world dedicated exclusively to designing, developing, manufacturing, marketing and selling Flash memory solutions. For more information, visit
http://www.Spansion.com.

Spansion(R), the Spansion logo, MirrorBit(R), MirrorBit(R) Eclipse(TM), ORNAND(TM), ORNAND2(TM), HD-SIM(TM) and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Spansion LLC in the U.S. and other countries. Other names used are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.